2015 Summer Blockbuster review

Summertime rhymes with school break, fireworks, BBQ, but just as inseparable are Hollywood's big blockbusters. Early 2015, even as early as late 2014 we had teasers and trailers for the big upcoming wave of big budget movies, many of which sequels to blockbuster sagas. Terminator 5, Jurassic Park 4 anyone?

Starting early summer I pulled daily stats for 20 of the most anticipated summer movies of 2015, and before we enter the new year, let's see how they did.

Rating Evolution

In these two earlier posts I looked at the evolution IMDB scores after movies' releases, as well as after Game of Thrones episodes aired. In both cases we observed a trend in rating decrease as time went by, although this phenomenon was much more sudden for TV episodes (a few days) than for movies (multiple weeks / months).

Here's the trend for our 20 blockbusters, all aligned according to release date, and titles ordered according to final rating:

Again, we observe the same declining trend, although the asymptote seems to be reached much sooner than for the average movie (earlier analysis).

Straight Outta Compton clearly emerges as the best-rated movie of the summer although it did not benefit from as much early marketing as most of its competitors. Straight Outta Compton also distinguishes itself from the other movies in another way. While all movies dropped an average of 0.3 rating points between release date and latest reading (not as dramatic as the 0.6 drop observed across a wider range of movies in the previous analysis already mentioned, as if summer blockbuster movies tend to decrease less and stabilize faster), Straight Outta Compton actually improved its rating by 0.1 (this is not entirely obvious from the graph, but the movie had a rating of 8.0 on its release date, jumped to 8.4 the next day, and slowly decreased to 8.1). Only two other movies saw their ratings increase, Trainwreck from 6.2 to 6.5 and Pixels from 4.8 to 5.7, the latter increase while quite spectacular still falls way short from making the movie a must-see, despite the insane amounts spent on marketing. As you might have noticed from my posts, my second hobby is basketball, and I remember this summer when not a day would go by without seeing an ad for Pixels on TV or on websites where NBA stars battled monsters from 1970 arcade games.

Which brings us to the next question: did budget have any effect on how well the movies did, either from a sales or rating perspective? Of course we are very far from establishing a causal model here so we will have to satisfy ourselves with simple correlations across five metrics of interest: IMDB rating, number of IMDB voters, movie budget, gross US sales and Metascore (aggregated score from well-established critics).

I would have expected the highest correlation to be between IMDB rating and Metascore (based on another analysis I did comparing the different rating methodologies). However, it came at second place (0.73) and I honestly had not anticipated the top correlation (0.87) between budget value and number of IMDB voters. Of course we can't read too much into this correlation that could be completely spurious, but it might be worth confirming again later with a larger sample. If I had to give a rough interpretation though, I would say that a movie's marketing spend is probably highly positively correlated with the movie's budget. So the higher the budget, the higher marketing spend and the stronger 'presence of mind' this will have on users who will be more likely to remember to rate the movie. Remember my example of all the Pixels ads? I didn't see the movie, but if I had, those ads might have eventually prompted me to rate the movie independently of how good it was, especially if those ads appeared online or even on IMDB itself.

But while we wait for that follow-up analysis, we can all start looking at the trailers for the most anticipated movies of next year, sequels and reboots leading the way once again: X-Men, Star Trek, Captain America, Independence Day...

Is this movie any good? Figuring out which movie rating to trust

In October, FiveThirtyEight published a post cautioning us when looking at movie reviews "Be Suspicious Of Online Movie Ratings, Especially Fandango’s".

To summarize the post as concisely as possible, Walt Hickey describes how Fandango inflates movie scores by rounding up, providing the example of Ted 2 which, despite having an actual score of 4.1 in the page source, displays 4 and a half stars on the actual page. The trend is true across all movies, a movie never had a lower score displayed, and in almost 50% of cases displayed a higher score than expected.

So if Fandango ratings aren't reliable, it could be worth turning to another major source for movie ratings: the Internet Movie Database IMDB.

Pulling all IMDB data, I identified just over 11K movies that had both an IMDB rating (provided by logged-in users) and a Metascore (provided by metacritic.com, aggregating reviews from top critics and publications). The corresponding scatterplot indicates a strong correlation between the two:

In these instances, it is always amusing to deep-dive into some of the most extreme outliers.
To allow for fair comparisons across both scales (0-100 for Metascore, 0-10 for IMDB), we mapped both scales to the full extent of a 0-100 scale, by subtracting the minimum value, dividing by the observed range, and multiplying by 100.
So if all IMDB ratings are between 1 and 9, a movie of score 7 will be mapped to 75 ((7 - 1) / (9 - 1) * 100).

Here are the movies with highest discrepancies in favor of Metascore:

Movie Title	IMDB Rating	Metascore	Genre	IMDB (norm)	Metascore (norm)	Delta
Justin Bieber: Never Say Never	1.6	52	Documentary,Music	7.2	51.5	-44.3
Hannah Montana, Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert	2.3	59	Documentary,Music	15.7	58.6	-42.9
Justifiable Homicide	2.9	62	Documentary	22.9	61.6	-38.7
G.I. Jesus	2.5	57	Drama,Fantasy	18.1	56.6	-38.5
How She Move	3.2	63	Drama	26.5	62.6	-36.1
Quattro Noza	3.0	60	Action,Drama	24.1	59.6	-35.5
Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience	2.1	45	Documentary,Music	13.3	44.4	-31.2
Justin Bieber's Believe	1.6	39	Documentary,Music	7.2	38.4	-31.2
Sol LeWitt	5.3	83	Biography,Documentary	51.8	82.8	-31.0
La folie Almayer	6.2	92	Drama	62.7	91.9	-29.3

And here are the movies with highest discrepancies in favor of IMDB's rating:

Movie Title	IMDB Rating	Metascore	Genre	IMDB (norm)	Metascore (norm)	Delta
To Age or Not to Age	7.5	15	Documentary	78.3	14.1	64.2
Among Ravens	6.8	8	Comedy,Drama	69.9	7.1	62.8
Speciesism: The Movie	8.2	27	Documentary	86.7	26.3	60.5
Miriam	7.2	18	Drama	74.7	17.2	57.5
To Save a Life	7.2	19	Drama	74.7	18.2	56.5
Followers	6.9	16	Drama	71.1	15.2	55.9
Walter: Lessons from the World's Oldest People	6.4	11	Documentary,Biography	65.1	10.1	55.0
Red Hook Black	6.5	13	Drama	66.3	12.1	54.1
The Culture High	8.5	37	Documentary,News	90.4	36.4	54.0
Burzynski	7.4	24	Documentary	77.1	23.2	53.9

Quickly glancing through the table we see that documentaries are often the cause of the biggest discrepancies one way or another. IMDB is extremely harsh with music-related documentaries, Justin Bieber has two "movies" in the top 10 discrepancies. Further deep-diving in those movies surfaces some interesting insights: For those movies, approximately 95% of voters gave it either a 0 or 10, and the remaining 5% a score between 1-9. Talk about "you either love him or hate him!". Breaking votes by age and gender, provides some additional background for the rating: independently of age category, no male group gave Justin a higher than 1.8 average, whereas no female group gave less than a 2.5. As expected, females under 18 gave the highest average score 5.3 and 7.8 respectively for each movie, but with 4 to 5 times more male than female voters, the abysmal overall scores were unavoidable.

OK, I probably spent WAY more time than I would have liked discussing Justin Bieber movies...

Let's look at how these discrepancies vary against different dimensions. The first one that was heavily suggested from the previous extremes was naturally genre:

We do see that Documentaries have the widest overall range, but all genres including documentaries actually have very similar distributions.

Another thought was to split movies by country. While IMDB voters are international, Metascore is very US-centric. So for foreign movies, voters from that country might be more predominant in voting and greater discrepancies observed when comparing to US critics. However, there did not seem to be a strong correlation between country and rating discrepancy.

We do observe a little more fluctuation in the distributions when splitting by country rather than genre, but all distributions still remain very similar. The US has more extremes, but this could also be due a result from the fact that the corresponding sample size is much larger.

As a final attempt, I used the movie's release date as a final dimension. Do voters and critics reach a better consensus over time and do with see a reduced discrepancy for older movies?

The first thing that jumps out is the strong increase in variance of the delta score (IMDB - Metascore). Similarly to the United States in the previous graph, this is also most likely a result from sample size. While IMDB voters can decide to vote for very old movies, Metacritic doesn't have access to reviews from top critics in 1894 to provide Carmencita with a Metascore (although I'm not sure it would be as generous as the IMDB score of 5.8 for this one minute documentary of a movie whose synopsis is: 'Performing on what looks like a small wooden stage, wearing a dress with a hoop skirt and white high-heeled pumps, Carmencita does a dance with kicks and twirls, a smile always on her face.')

But the more subtle trend is the evolution of the median delta value. Over time, it seems that the delta between IMDB score and Metascore has slowly increased, from a Metascore advantage to an IMDB advantage. From a critics perspective, it would appear as if users underrated old movies and overrated more recent ones. However the increase in trend has stabilized when we entered the 21st century.

I couldn't end this post without a mention to Rotten Tomatoes, also highly popular with movie fans. While Metacritic takes a more nuanced approach to how it scores a movie based on the reviews, Rotten Tomatoes only rates it as 0 (negative review) or 1 (positive review) and takes the average. In his blog post, Phil Roth explores the relationship between Metascores and Rotten Tomatoes and, as expected, finds a very strong relationship between the two:

So to quickly recap, there is clearly a strong correlation between the two ratings, but with enough variance that both provide some information. For some people, their tastes might better align with top critics whereas others might have similar satisfaction levels as their peers. Personally, I've rarely been disappointed by a movie with an IMDB score greater than 7.0, and I guess that I'll continue to use that rule of thumb.

And definitely won't check Fandango.

Love at first sight? Evolution of a movie's rating

Every day, over 3 million unique visitors go to imdb.com and I am very often one of those. With limited time to watch movies, I heavily rely on IMDB's ratings to determine whether a movie is a rental or theatre go/no-go.

My memory is sufficiently bad that I sometimes need to check a new release's rating a few days apart, but sufficiently good that I can remember rating changes. The most common scenario consists of me checking a whole bunch of ratings for different movies, then trying to talk my wife into going to see the one I like best, using IMDB's rating as an extra argument. She'll systematically - and skeptically - ask for the movie's rating (she's also part of the daily 3 million). And I'll say it's really good, something like 8.3, here let me show you... and a 7.4 appears on my screen and I look like a fool.

Of course, it's completely expected that IMDB ratings would evolve, and even more so when the movies have recently released and have few voters: I fully anticipate Charlie Chaplin's City Lights to still have an 8.6 rating a month from now, but don't think Ted 2 will still have a 7.2 next month, or even when this post gets published! But the question I had was how do movie ratings evolve? How long does it take them to reach their asymptotic value? Are movies over- or under-rated right around their release date? It would seem reasonable that people would have a tendency to overestimate new movies they just saw at the movie theatre. The bias is due to the fact that if they made the effort of going to see the movie shortly after it's release they were probably anticipating it would be worth their money and time. Therefore, they might overrate the movie after seeing it independently of its quality to remain coherent with their prior expectations ('coherency principle' in psychology).
An internet blogger by the name of Gary didn't really phrase it as such, taking the approach of insulting people who bumped 'Up' to the 18th position of best all-time movies in IMDB. A fun read.

To monitor rating evolution, I extracted daily IMDB data up until 2015 data for 22 different movies released in 2012: Branded, Cloud Atlas, Cosmopolis, Dredd 3D, Ice Age: Continental Drift, Killing Them Softly, Lincoln, Paranormal Activity, Paranorman, Rec3: Genesis, Resident Evil Retribution, Rise of the Guardians, Savages, Skyfall, Sparkle, The Big Wedding, The Bourne Legacy, The Dark Knight, The Expendables, The Words, Total Recall and Twilight: Breaking Dawn 2.

For each movie I recorded three maun metrics of interest: IMDB rating, the number of voters and the metascore (from metacritic.com which aggregates reviews to generate a unique rating out of 100 for movies, TV series, music and video games).

Here's an example of the data plotted for The Dark Knight:

Originally rated 9.2, it dropped to 8.8 in the first month, then dropped a little more to 8.6 after 6 months where it appears to have stabilized. I just checked and it seems to have dropped an additional 0.1 point, now at 8.5 three years after release. Let's now look at the number of people who voted for it:

The number of voters rapidly increased right after the release, and although it isn't increasing as fast afterwards, many people continue to vote for it. This curve is quite typical across all movies.

Finally, let's look at the metacritic score:

I'm not sure we can even talk about a curve here. Momentarily rated 85, metascore dropped to 78 at release and hasn't changed to this date. This is perfectly normal as the metascore is based on a small sample of official critics ('Hollywood Reporter', 'Los Angeles Times', 'USA Today'). Reviews are released around the same time the movie is, no critic is going to be reviewing the Dark Knight Rises today which is why metascores are so stable.

Ignoring the y-axes, the shape of the curves are quite similar across movies, though there are some outliers worth showing.

Increasing IMDB rating? Most movies seem to get overrated at first and stabilize to a lower asymptotic rating. But in certain cases we see the rating increase after the release, as seen here with The Big Wedding with Robert De Niro and Diane Keaton:

Still with The Big Wedding, staggered worldwide release dates are clearly highlighted from the shape of the number of voters.

Based on our small sample can we estimate the overestimation of a movie's rating when it is released. After how many months does the rating stabilize?

Combining the data for all the movies together and aligning them based on their release date (thus ignoring and seasonal effects), we obtain the following graph where the x-axis is weeks since release:

We see a steady decline in rating by about 0.6 points over a period of about 7 months. A more surprising phenomenon is the upward trend in ratings that starts about a year after the original release. The trend seems quite strong, however we should keep in mind
that our original sample size of movies was small (22), and we only have data beyond 75 weeks after release for a handful of those movies, so the upward trend on the very right could be completely artificial and a great example of overfitted data!

A similar break in trend occurs for the number of voters:

As for the metascore, it appears remarkably stable right after release for the reasons already mentioned previously.

In a nutshell, movies do appear to be very slightly overestimated at release time (assuming the long-term asymptote is a movie's "true" rating), and the difference in rating (approximately 0.3 between the first month and months 2 through 6) was small yet significant (based on a paired t-test).

So if you do use IMDB to help your movie selection, definitely keep in mind that while the movie is probably good, it most likely isn't as good as 'Up'.

Game of Thrones Season 5, is the best behind us? [NO SPOILERS]

[This post does NOT contain any spoilers. The reason is very simple, I myself have not yet started the fifth season (OK this might be the only spoiler, there are at least 5 seasons...), so I am only focusing on number of viewers and ratings for each episode aired.]

I'm not even going to present the TV series Game of Thrones. Merchandising for it is perhaps not as overwhelming and invasive as it is for Frozen, I doubt many of view have no idea what this show is about.

As mentioned previously, we are currently midway in the fifth season, and I figured it might be a good time to figure how good of a TV show Game of Thrones is, and how it is performing from a viewership and rating point of view.

Viewership

The following graph displays the evolution of viewership for each episode of each season for the initial airing on HBO on Sundays at 9pm.

Two things clearly stand out: there is a strong steady rise corresponding to the series huge success. But, as is the case with any rise, when does it stop. Well, after reaching an all-time max with the first episode of the current fifth season (8.0 million), viewership has rather dramatically dropped with "only" 6.2 million for the sixth episode. This value is less than each episode of the previous fourth season. Will the decrease continue, or did we just have a few below-expectation episodes. Each season does have a small mid-season dip, somewhat due to the way each season is constructed as a highly-strategic chess game, with the different groups carrying out their tactics. The second half of the season should provide some element of response as to where we are headed.

To really put into perspective the importance of the decline in viewership from the last episodes, I forecasted viewership until the end of the fifth season once using all the available data (including the decrease, in blue), and once ignoring data for the fifth season (in green). The difference in forecasts are quite dramatic:

Metacritic ratings

Let's now turn towards metacritic ratings. According to the site that has made a name for itself by aggregating a wide range of critics into a single value ranging from 0-100, we observe a striking similarity in ratings and viewership:

Again, we observe a steady increase throughout the first four seasons, and the first decrease for the current fifth season.


IMDB ratings

Metacritic also contains user ratings, however I preferred to turn towards IMDB for individual episode ratings. Sample sizes were larger and extraction was easier.

Here is the evolution of the ratings for each episode:

The values for the last few episodes should be taken with a grain of salt. Episode 7 of the fifth season had a rating of 10.0 before it aired, but has now reached a rating more on par with the rest of the series, 9.3.

The trend here is somewhat different from what viewership and metacritic were indicating: it appears that season 5 episodes are rated just as highly as those from previous seasons.





Best series ever?

As indicated previously, I noticed that the last episode of Game of Thrones was briefly rated 10.0 right before airing. This led me to wonder whether episodes had ever been rated a perfect score of 10. It turns out that four of them had, all Dragon Ball Z episodes!


Relaxing to ratings above 9.8, I found 448 episodes (a little under half being Dragon Ball Z!). In the mix, two Breaking Bad (from the fifth and final season) and a Six Feet Under (series finale, also season five). No Game of Thrones, the top-rated episode has 9.7.

Looking at all these series and ratings, one can't help but wonder if there is some sort of agreement on the best show ever. There are naturally many ways and sources to compare them, but everytime, Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad and The Wire seem to top the list:

• best overall IMDB rating (secret IMDB formula): Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones are tied at 9.5, The Wire has 9.4
• average IMDB rating of each individual episode: The Wire has an average episode rating of 8.7, Game of Thrones an average of 8.5 and Breaking Bad an average of 8.3
• metacritic season-by-season rating (critics): The final season of breaking bad got a 99 (5th highest all-time), The Wire seasons 3 and 4 each got 98 (8th/9th highest all-time), the best Game of Thrones season (fourth) had a 95 which is 20th highest all-time
• metacritic season-by-season rating (users): This is where Breaking Bad dominates: all five seasons are in the top 12 all-time (positions 1, 3, 4, 11 and 12), the best Game of Thrones season comes in at position 20 only, while the Wire does rather well with three seasons in the top 10.

So no clear overall winner, but Game of Thrones however is the only one still running. But for how long?

Hollywood movie trends

One night in 1996, a twenty-three year-old Larry Page attempted to work out a way of downloading the Internet.

My objective the past few months was slightly less ambitious (and for that reason will probably not make me a multi-billionaire 20 years from now). I decided to download IMDB.

If you like numbers and stats (and movies!), IMDB is rather awesome and has the potential for endless statistical analyses. I already wrote a post a while back on the collaboration between Johnny Depp and Tim Burton and attempted to answer who had benefited the most of the collaboration. I have many other analyses in mind, but before looking at those, I thought I would first take a step back and look at the evolution of the movie industry almost from the very beginning.

I would first like to point out that as exhaustive as I would like my analyses to be, there are limitations. First of all, there most likely is a bias as to which movies make it in IMDB or not. There is also a bias as to who rates the movies and how. I watch quite a few movies and systematically notice that almost all French movies (even the really good ones) get pretty bad scores. Now that I think about it, this could be an analysis in itself!

The first thing I looked at was the distribution of ratings over time (gray boxplots) as well as the number of movies (red line) since the end of the 1800s.

From a size perspective, it is striking both how the number of movies per year has exploded hockey-stick style starting but also the abruptness of the saturation around 2005. There is a possibility that I was not able to pull all movies for the later years (2012 data seems particularly suspicious), but there still remains rather strong evidence that in a period of 15/20 years we have reached saturation in the number of movies coming out at around 10K a year. You'd still have to watch 28 a day if you wanted to see them all!

As for the distribution of IMDB scores, the median (black dot in the middle of the gray boxes) has remained remarkably stable over time, hovering around 6. The spread has increased slightly as well as the extremes but this is also a consequence of the increase in the number of movies produced: the more that come out, the more likely of getting very bad ones as well as very good ones!

Let's now take a quick look at the proportion of movies of the different genres over time. Again, IMDB is a little tricky here as a movie can have multiple genres. I here associated each movie to its primary genre. I did run the analysis where I took multiple genres into account (so that the original Star Wars was triple-counted as Action, Adventure and Fantasy). It turns out that the results were extremely similar. Out of the 28 unique genres, I have only represented those with sufficient fractions and with the most interesting trends.

The most remarkable trend is that of short movies. While almost 50% of the 1910 movies were short features, that number stabilized around 5% for almost 40 years until the 1990s, before increasing suddenly to almost 1 out of 3 movies nowadays. The trend for Documentaries has been very similarly, but stabilized at about 1 in 6 movies in the recent years.

Westerns were popular back in the days, but are almost unheard of as of 1970s. Instead the 1970s mark the simultaneous 30 year long golden age of both Action and Adult movies. I have to admit that I was surprised in the decline in Adult movies since the late twentieth century, as I figured the oldest job in the world would be continue to be the oldest inspiration of the world. Might be worth further investigation in another post (I do expect quite a few hits on that one...).

Here are some other interesting findings I made along the way:

War movies: Popular during war times

While most genres have trends similar to the one described for the first figure, with an explosion in number of movies around 1990 that has since then stabilized, War movies displays a nice exception:

War movies come during and after wars: loo at World War 2, Vietnam, a small spike around the first Gulf War, and a big surge right after 2001.


Horror movies: Stop making theses!!!

In terms of IMDB ratings, most genres follow the general trend of a long-term stabilization around 6. Horror movies have quite a different story to tell:

Although the number of Horror movies being releases follows the same S-curve we've seen for the general trend, ratings for Horror have essentially dropped continuously since the 1920s!


Film what?

While almost all genres still exist today (and actually released at an increased pace), the Film Noir genre is quite particular:

Its golden age period lasted less then 20 years around the 1950s, and no Film Noirs have been made since then. Quite unfortunate when we see that certain gems like "The Third Man" with Orson Welles fall in this category! 

Rated SM R for super mature

We observed earlier some surprising tendencies in the Adult movie category, here's a deep dive.. I mean a closer look:

I have some doubts on the reliability of these numbers, and don't think that the number of Adult Movies released per year in less than 500 (especially given that the estimated revenue from videos is estimated to be in the $0.5Billion - $1.8Billion range ! It really depends on whether IMDB performs some filtering as to which movies get added to the database.
That being said, even if the absolute number of movies released is biased, the distribution of the ratings is more trustworthy, and the "n" shape is quite interesting: ratings seem to have saturated at around 6.5 but then suddenly plummeted over the past few years.

So that was a quick overview of what can be pulled from IMDB. As mentioned at the beginning of the post, expect many more analyses to follow!

Evolution of movie ratings

We've all checked a movie's IMDB rating to decide whether to go see it at the movies, but ever notice how the rating seems to drop when you check a few days later?

We here look at the evolution of 18 movie's ratings before/after their release to see whether this holds on this very small subset.

The hypothesis would be that there is self-selection bias in a movie's ratings, with die hard fans being the first to go see it (most often before its official release) and rate it, but because of their die hardness rating it higher than the average audience member.

For the 10 movies of interest I extracted (almost) daily ratings. Then, for each movie I compare the daily ratings to the rating on day 0 as baseline. This is defined as "IMDB rating delta" in the following graph:

Despite the small sample size, we can clearly see a decreasing trend starting a few days before release and continuing downwards two weeks after the official release. On average, movies, lose 0.4 out of 10 in IMDB rating over that period.

After the second weeks, things start to stabilize somewhat, as the number of ratings increases and we tend towards the movie's final long term rating. Based on the plot it seems as if there is a slight increase from week 2 onwards, but this is most likely due to the small sample size which gets even smaller in the future (while I have day 0 data for all movies, I do not necessarily have day 30 data for all).

But what about the metascore (aggregated score from www.metacritic.com based on "official" critics)? The same type of plot can be generated:

The pattern is here somewhat the same with a sharp decrease right around release date, but stabilization is much quicker. This makes sense since, as noted in the earlier post on individual movie evolutions, critics tend to publish their opinions right around release dates, not weeks after.

Hopefully I will be able to extend the analysis to more movies over greater time periods, but data extraction is in real-time unfortunately, no "back to the future" to speed things up ;-)

Is Dexter getting better?

My latest entries have mostly been basketball-focused but the highly anticipated playoff matchups are to be blamed for that!

So after my post on the Johnny Depp - Tim Burton collaboration, I would like to take a stab at tracking the evolution of TV series. I think there are a broad type of questions that can be considered, such as:

How does the rating of individual episodes evolve throughout the course of TV series lifetime? Are there really "good" and "bad" seasons? Do TV series get cancel when the ratings go down by too much? Is there a common threshold? Do all seasons have high-rated cliffhangers at the end of the season?

Data

Similarly to the Johnny Depp analysis, I will be extracting my data from IMDB. To start off, I will focus on one particular TV series (and personal favorites): Dexter.

Plot

Let us plot the evolution of the individual episode ratings by "time":

Two main insights stand out:

• there appears to be a "seasonal" pattern within each season:
  - the ratings either stay flat or go down in the first few episodes
  - the ratings then shoot upwards during the second half of the season
• after 5 seasons of overall similar quality, it appears that the last season has not performed as well. For the first time in over 5 years ratings dropped before 8.0, and even the strong season finale was the lowest-rated finales.

If we compare the distribution of season 6's ratings with those of all prior seasons, the difference jumps out:

The best season 6 episode has a rating barely greater than the median rating of all past seasons!

I will start looking at other TV series and see if an overall low-rated season is the beginning of the end (hopefully not!). Do networks quickly panic and cancel shows as soon as they start dropping in overall quality?